Achievement Unlocked

I was waiting for some friends to log on to play some Tabletop Simulator, and I found myself scrolling through the achievements. Things like Faithful: Play Tabletop Simulator for over 50 hours, and Rage Quit: Flip the table in an absolute fit of rage… 100 times.

They are silly things, and I don’t think I would open up Tabletop Simulator just to achieve one… But it did make me think about different ways to engage with the program, different games I could play, and how in the world you can fail at flipping the table.

Scythe

One of Jamie Stegmaier’s goals is for players to bring his games to table as much as possible. It’s a philosophy that makes a lot of sense. We want our games to be played, to entertain, and to engage. Here’s Scythe’s achievement sheet.

I’ve never taken Scythe out in order to tick off an achievement, but it has offered another layer of interaction with the game. After a hard fought battle we get to check if anything new was unlocked. It’s another opportunity to engage with and talk about the game, to pull out unused faction boards, and reminisce about our past battles.

Achievement sheets are another way to engage players. They probably don’t drive a lot of decision to pull a game off the shelf, but they engage us, and increase our buy in, and that’s probably enough.

Victory & Beyond

The LOOP has normal victory achievements, but also a healthy dose of the unusual: “A player is half an hour late to the gaming session”, or “Listen to the back to the future soundtrack”.

Including out of game achievements is an interesting idea. It adds another layer of sub-game, but unless well tied in thematically, I could see it being a distraction.

I’ll definitely be crafting achievement sheets for our future games, they are a great, low cost way to further engage players. And it might just be what gets one of our games to the table just a little more often.

What are your favorite achievement sheets, and what makes them great?